Shift and Trace

When hand drawing animation, it is very important to stay on model as it is easy to lose the proportions or features of a character. The Shift and Trace feature lets you temporarily move a drawing so you can trace it on a new drawing. This is similar to animators working on an animation light table and using an entire character or cut-out pieces of a character and moving it underneath the new drawing to trace it.

Your drawings will not be modified. It will only be moved, rotated or scaled in the Shift and Trace mode. When you turn off this mode, the repositioned drawing returns to its normal state.

Select the check box next to the drawing you want to allow to be temporarily transformed. By default, all drawings are enabled for Shift and Trace operations.

Select the drawing you want to move.

If you want to trace more than one drawing at the same time, you can link them together. In the drawing desk, select several drawings and click the Link Drawings button to lock their position together—see How to link your shift and trace drawings.

When using the Shift and Trace feature, you can link different drawings from the drawing desk, so they move together when dragging or scaling. These drawings can be from different columns in the Xsheet view.

In the drawing desk, display the drawings you want to use for the Shift and Trace operation.

Hold down Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (Mac OS X) and select the drawings you want to link together.

In the Drawing Desk toolbar, click the Link Drawings button to enable linking.

You may end up with a lot of drawings in your onion skin display while working with the Shift and Trace feature. You can disable individual drawings from the onion skin display without deactivating them.

In the Tools toolbar, click the Onion Skin button.

In the drawing desk, click on the drawing’s Onion Skin button to enable or disable it.When enabled, the icon turns black .